Most "AI support bot" demos bolt an LLM onto a shared Gmail or hang a webhook off a helpdesk and call it a day. That works right up until you want the agent to actually be a participant in the conversation — to receive mail at a real address, decide what to do with it, and reply as itself instead of as a script poking at someone else's mailbox.
So let's not do that. Let's give support@yourcompany.com its own first-class identity: an Agent Account that receives every inbound email, classifies it with a model, routes and filters it with server-side rules, and replies in the right thread — once, never twice. No shared inbox, no scraping a human's account, no helpdesk middleman.
I work on the Nylas CLI, so the terminal commands below are the exact ones I reach for when I'm setting one of these up. Every step gets the two-angle tour: the raw curl call and the nylas command that does the same thing.
What you actually get
An Agent Account is, underneath, just a Nylas grant with a grant_id. That's the whole trick, and it's worth sitting with for a second: there's nothing new to learn on the data plane. Every grant-scoped endpoint you already know — Messages, Drafts, Threads, Folders, Attachments, Contacts, Calendars, Events — works against this grant exactly the way it works against a Gmail or Microsoft grant you obtained through OAuth. The provider happens to be nylas instead of google, and that's the only difference your application code sees.
